How a Higher Education Institution Transformed Donation Management in Salesforce with ChargeOn

Executive Summary 

Headquartered in New South Wales, the client is a world-class institution ranked consistently among Australia’s top universities. It employs between 5,001 and 10,000 people and specializes in Tertiary Education, Research, and Leadership. The client provides specialized academic programs across a vast range of disciplines, including Medicine and Health, Law, Engineering, Business, Science, and the Arts.

As the client expanded its “Advancement” business functions utilizing funds derived from donations, it utilized Salesforce Service Cloud with the Affinaquest add-on to manage donor relations. They partnered with Cyntexa to implement ChargeOn to replace a manual, phone-based donation system with a fully automated engine. The project successfully centralized all payment activities. It enabled automated processing for both one-time and recurring donations and made sure that their entire giving system met PCI-DSS security standards.

Areas of Improvement

Before partnering with us, the client identified several areas where operational efficiency could be enhanced.

Manual Phone-In Donation Processing

The client’s teams used to process payments manually over a phone call with the donors. Teams had to manage the data every time it changed. This approach led to operational inefficiencies, increased human errors, and delayed the acknowledgment of donations. 

PCI Compliance and Security Risks

The client was manually processing credit card payments, which posed challenges in achieving and maintaining strict PCI-DSS compliance. Therefore, handling sensitive card data without a secure, automated system posed a risk of data exposure and security breaches.

Fragmented Donation Management 

The client required a solution to handle both one-time and recurring donations without separate workflows. Their existing system could not automatically batch or categorize these donations for daily processing, making financial reconciliation a labor-intensive process.

Disconnected Financial Data 

Payment information was not automatically syncing with their Affinaquest advancement system. This gap created a lack of real-time visibility into donor transactions, making it difficult for the finance team to track success rates or identify errors quickly.

How ChargeOn Helped?

We customized ChargeOn for the client to meet their unique business requirements and deliver optimal efficiency in their payment workflows.

Secure Tokenization for Instant Compliance

By leveraging ChargeOn’s Tokenization feature, the client was able to replace sensitive card details with secure, unique tokens. This helped them achieve full PCI-DSS compliance. Moreover, allowing donor registration upfront enabled easy repeat donations, eliminating the need to feed payment details again and again. 

Automated Batching via Scheduled and Recurring Payments

To address the batching challenge, we utilized ChargeOn’s Scheduled and Recurring Payment workflows. We set up these workflows to automatically create and process batches for one-time donations every day. For recurring donations, the system uses due date triggers to automatically populate batches with donor information and tokenized card details, processing them at specified intervals without any manual intervention.

Dynamic Custom Object Mapping 

A key differentiator was ChargeOn’s Object Flexibility, which allowed it to map payment functionalities directly to the client’s custom advancement objects in Affinaquest. This meant payments could be initiated directly from a donor’s record, ensuring that every transaction was perfectly synced with their existing system. 

Real-Time Insights and Error Capture 

The client utilized native Reports and Dashboards to gain 100% visibility into donation processing, including successful transactions, failed, missed, and other exceptions. Additionally, we implemented the Unresolved Transaction object to ensure that if a gateway error occurred mid-transaction, it was captured for an admin to resolve immediately, preventing any loss of revenue.

Benefits 

• 100% Secure Payment Processing through PCI DSS Compliance 
• 95% Reduction in Manual Tasks
• Seamless Integration and Payment Data Sync across Affinaquest and Salesforce
• 97% Data Entry Error Reduction